ADA POTTER

Artist Statement

In my installations I re-stage the material qualities of photography. I use reflective mylar and mirrors to capture and play with light, calling up a filmic process. I also employ transparent and translucent materials, like acetate and mylar, to mimic analog film while invoking a feeling of hi-tech ephemerality.

Because of the vast quantity of images that we each create, but mostly never print, we generally engage with digital images as an archive of files. The images themselves have become less weighted and hide from us in plain sight. We misunderstand them as insignificant while in fact these files trace real occurrences.

My response is to re-imagine this ephemerality, to make physical the qualities of the photograph. I physically invert the photographic ground to disorient the viewer. The prints are digitally altered, illuminated and flipped on their axis to muddle recognition. I am thinking about the difference between formal surfaces and physical or metaphorical grounding.

This thinking has lead to a series of prints of surfaces. Abrateted mylar, sidewalks, tissues and decorative plaster have become the subjects for my recent bodies of work. Like abstract modernist painting, I use the surface as a site to explore the medium. But unlike modernism, I hope to create a sort of theater or space for engagement that embraces hack-y drama, output margins and seams. I have no pretensions or delusions of universality or purity of form. It’s just play.

In a darkroom finding the films grain is crucial to printing a clear image. I love this grain and it still haunts my digital process. I use found images culled for the internet alongside personal snapshots. This process of collecting and constant capturing is almost universal today. We are all savy image makers and consumers. I render them concrete to engineer an unorthodox experience.

There is a futility in my aspirational re-thinking of materials. I want to create a space we don’t have; a space between material sensation and the theoretical understanding. But the seams of this illusion are fundamental to the theater I enliven.